Sunday, October 16, 2016

How Comicbooks Help You Survive Politics

…5 Lessons to Unleash Your Inner Hero

Hi there ,

Most of our days are either being infuriated with the politicians running for election or turning them completely off to allow us to recharge our inner peace.

And at this date, we still have about a month to go. This mutual destruction of both candidates will continue another twenty-some days. If you take them seriously, you’d think the end of the world is at hand.

But the solution is to laugh at them – and read your comics for better solutions.

Comics are popular entertainment because they are a metaphor for life we can use to learn how to survive better.

There are several lessons comics have been teaching us all along that we can use to deal with the current noisy political scene and survive.

Lesson 1.2 reasons good always wins out.

This isn’t just fiction. If you go back through comics, through Star Trek episodes, through all Western fiction, you’ll find that Good always triumphs over Evil. Even if it takes a few issues. Eventually, that’s the result.

If you chase back through history, even in our darkest hours, you’ll find that the Good Guys always win, regardless. Same deal. Might take awhile, but through our history, we’ve always ended up making things better.

The first reason for this is pretty simple: Evil is self-destructive. It seeks to destroy everything, including itself and everyone around it. Cause and Effect. Golden Rule. What you do to others will come back to you.

The second reason is that Evil was created by Good, and so is dissolved by it. Practically, it’s the problem is the lack of good, not the presence of evil. Charles F. Hannel had it as “you can’t shovel the darkness out of a room, you can only bring in more light.”

Those are the two core principles which explain a lot of what we are facing these days. Our mainstream media has gone crazy as they long ago accepted false ideas about how to act. Consider that point above. When they are truly impartial, they are respected. When they take one side or the other, they can’t be trusted. And the trust for the “news” media is actually less than Congress and slightly higher than a used-car salesperson.

Lesson 2.The world around you is mostly fake – here’s why.

Our worst problem is conventional wisdom. It’s false so often that the most common recommendation is to ignore it and go the opposite direction. Look this up for yourself in “quotes about conventional wisdom.”

Yet people run on this most of the time. They receive it, accept it, and never test what they find. You have probably heard of the 80/20 rule – that if you focus on the 20 percent which is producing 80 percent of your income, you’ll be able to profit better in life. This alone starts to show you how many bad solutions are out there.

If you then take 20 percent of that 20 percent, you’ll wind up with about 4 percent to focus on. Concentrating on that 4 percent will make your life even more simpler and richer. This starts to explain why 90% of the U.S. is on government handouts according to the Social Security Administration. It explains why some 98% of all of us never picks a goal for our lives.

In the comics, you don’t have this problem. The Good Guys always have a stellar ideal they follow. Star Trek was a peaceful exploring mission. And meanwhile defeated every effort to “dominate” the known universe by force. The X-Men program was developed to help people understand and use their forces for good. Like the Justice League, etc.

Evil really just defeats itself constantly. Yet in our own world, the bulk of humankind is in its current state because they have accepted conventional wisdom which is more destructive than good. And so, the huge numbers of people who never achieve their goals, who don’t live life to their fullest, who never attain their built-in abilities.

Lesson 3.You have super-powers that you don’t know of.

The worst thing our modern education does is to train people not to use their own imagination. Yet our beliefs create our abilities.

The successful are exceptions. Why this happens is kinda funny. Since success literally means result, the people who focus on getting things completed are successful. If you look back at the most successful people, you’ll find that they mostly dropped out of college and focused on one narrow area, handling each problem that came up so that it was permanently solved. The other thing is that they took on star-high goals.

Again, these are the way our comicb00k heroes approach life. They find their own talent and find that this makes them different from other people around them. When they work to improve this particular talent, they find that they can see themselves achieving a much higher state. They can use this talent to improve their own conditions and those around them.

Your beliefs create your abilities. But our schools are patterned on everyone acting the same way at the same time. (It actually traces back to Otto Von Bismark, who wanted school systems to create unquestioning armies.) But our heroes in the comics and in real life don’t follow these restrictions.

Practically, as no one can tell you how or what to believe, you can develop any ability you want. Sure, it still may take that fabled “10,000 hours” to get any good at it. But any work you’ve already done along this line is to your credit.

You become what you think about. And no one really can tell you what to think. So think big, think originally, think for yourself.

Lesson 4.Finding your own bliss will make your life worth living.

Go back through all the origin stories of comic book heroes. Once they accepted their own abilities and started to develop them, only then did their lives start to sort out. As long as they developed them for good. (As above, using abilities destructively will only lead you to your own destruction.)

Why have we gotten to the point where we have to choose between the worst of two worlds? Because we have been trying to ignore our own basic bliss, our purpose, what we are most interested in, our suppressed inner super-power.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychologist Abraham Maslow both found the same point – if people followed their own peak experiences (their bliss) then they would achieve their highest potential possible.

Campbell found this when he developed his “monomyth” of a single unifying plot that explained all legends and myths through our recorded traditions. Disney, Spielberg, and other movie makers have found this useful in making very profitable stories. This is similar to what you feel when you leave an inspiring movie – hope.

Maslow was in search of motivations, and instead of studying crazy people like most of Freudian psychology, he studied the outliers of people who achieved more than anyone else around them.

Both Maslow and Campbell came to the point that the people who looked for and chased what gave them the most satisfaction did better in life and achieved remarkable things.

No one can tell you what your bliss is. You have to find it for yourself. But if you pay attention to what makes you feel good, and what you are most interested in, and what you’ve trained yourself to do, then you can narrow down to this pretty quickly. The more you focus on finding your own bliss, the faster you’ll start succeeding in whatever you decide to do.

Lesson 5.Governments are temporary (and mostly unnecessary.)

You don’t find governments lasting very long, but longer in comics than real life. Where is the USSR? The Roman Empire? The Greek Democracy? The Mongols who controlled more land than any other single government? The Egyptian Pharaohs? The Assyrians, where civilization supposedly started (and is now mostly desert and fought over by small tribes of terrorists?)

Governments only succeed with the support of the people they represent. When they get too big, too clumsy, too meddlesome, then the people quit believing in them and quit listening to orders. Many wars have ended because people literally walked off the battlefield and quit listening to the generals and the commander in chief. Long before that, the people at home quit supporting them with enough food and supplies for them to win.

Taxes are like that too. When they get too high, people find ways around them. It’s always been that way. Look it up in your history books.

Our modern times are no different. Corporations and money-hungry individuals seek to influence government like they always have. Government technically always fails because it inevitably becomes a small elite group trying to make decisions for everyone else. They think they know best. And they can’t.

Our worst presidents are those who mostly acted for themselves, who followed beliefs which were those of a know-best elite. They shut off others from choosing their own beliefs.

So, of course that fails, and always will, because only the individual can decide for themselves. And they choose to believe what they will, and those beliefs create their world. Where they accept an unworkable belief, it ultimately fails. Because all beliefs are tested in the real world.

Some individuals have been able to temporarily persuade a nation of people to accept their beliefs to achieve a destructive end. Hitler and the Nazi’s were the worst example of this, but not the only one. North Korea has a similar problem right now. Elites forcing unworkable beliefs on people works only temporarily.

The exceptional success of the United States is due to the beliefs they wrote down in the organizing documents. Like the concept of the “pursuit of happiness.” The concept of “no taxation without representation.” The concept of a government is supposed to protect basic freedoms of the individual (and otherwise stay out of the way.)

Russia probably has more natural resources than are found in the North American continent. But their governments have never recognized basic rights of people to live their own lives. And every time their government goes to war, people and corporations withdraw their funds and trade, and the people are punished because their elites screwed up. Money only follows peace.

The U.S. isn’t perfect. And our elites have screwed up over and over. It’s always been individuals who followed their beliefs and fixed those screw-ups. Lots of individuals using their own native abilities.

The trick to being a hero(ine) is to figure out and follow your own beliefs, your own bliss. And make the world into what you want it to be. Use your native superpowers. Be exceptional.

The more you work for improving the lives of as many people as you can around you, the better your own life will end up. That’s the oldest natural law we all agree on. Cause and Effect. What you give, you get. You are treated as well as you treat others.